The Oak Ridge National Laboratory officially turned on the switch for its new supercomputer, Titan, just in time to claim the title of "World's Fastest Supercomputer" by Top500. This marks the 20th year for Tip500 and its 40th list.

Titan is a Cray XK7 system that hit 17.59 Petaflop/s (quadrillionsof calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark. It features 560,640 processors, including 261,632 Nvidia K20x accelerator cores.

Published: November 12, 2012 -- 17:34 GMT (09:34 PST)

Caption by: Andy Smith

The former No. 1 supercomputer is Sequoia. Sequoia which is an IBM BlueGene/Q system. It's installed at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration at the Livermore National Laboratory.

Sequoia achieved 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores. Sequoia is the first system with one million or more cores.

Published: November 12, 2012 -- 17:34 GMT (09:34 PST)

Caption by: Andy Smith

Another former No. 1 on the Top500 list is Japan's K computer. It reached 10.51 Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.

Published: November 12, 2012 -- 17:34 GMT (09:34 PST)

Caption by: Andy Smith

The new Mira supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory ranked No. 3 on the Top 500 list. Its a new IBM/Blue Gene/Q system and hit 10.51 Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark from 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores placed it fourth on the list.

Mira is used by from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies.

Published: November 12, 2012 -- 17:34 GMT (09:34 PST)

Caption by: Andy Smith

Juqueen, upgraded to become the fastest supercomputer in Europe is housed in at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center near Munich, Germany. IBM iDataplex system which contains 155.000 cores and has a peak performance of 3 Petaflop/s.

Published: November 12, 2012 -- 17:34 GMT (09:34 PST)

Caption by: Andy Smith

Super MUC, located at Leibniz Rechenzentrum is an IBM Dataplex DX360M4 with 147,456 cores. It features Intel Xeon E5-268 8c 2.70GHz and reached 2.897 PetaFlop/s on the Linpac performance tests.

Published: November 12, 2012 -- 17:34 GMT (09:34 PST)

Caption by: Andy Smith

New to list is Dell's PowerEdge C8220 system called Stampede is installed in the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

Stampede uses the brand new Intel Xeon Phi processors (previously known as MIC) to achieve its 2.6 Petaflop/s.

Published: November 12, 2012 -- 17:34 GMT (09:34 PST)

Caption by: Andy Smith

China's top supercomputer Tianhe-A1 was the fastest supercomputer in November 2010. It is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.